Gates Foundation Praises UAE's AI Vision and Agricultural Tech Initiatives in New Report

The UAE's artificial intelligence ambitions and affinity for agricultural innovation are helping the Gates Foundation to ensure that AI is a global equaliser, the organisation's chief executive has said. Mark Suzman, who leads the organisation founded by former Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates, spoke with The National as the foundation released a new report on AI.

Highlighting the UAE's drive to be a technological leader, Mr Suzman spoke of a 2023 partnership announcement designed to spur agricultural innovation and reduce hunger. "We did a joint announcement with the UAE during Cop28 climate conference, called Aim for Scale, where we each put in $100 million," he said.

Mr Suzman said the UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence has done "some really interesting work" in studying AI's potential to prevent diseases and improve weather forecasting. It is that sort of thinking, Mr Suzman said – studying and implementing technology to benefit society – that was the cornerstone of the 2026 Make this Matter AI report.

The Gates Foundation has also announced it would be spending "at least $1 billion over the next two years to expand access to AI and the solutions, opportunities and knowledge that has too often been out of reach for many around the world". The foundation's report arrives amid a growing concern about AI's potential effects on society, ranging from large-scale labour disruption to environmental impacts due to energy needs related to the technology.

Weeks before the foundation released its report, Mr Gates composed an almost 6,000-word essay in which he conveyed his worries about what unregulated AI might do to the fabric of society. Mr Suzman said the Gates Foundation's report outlines the ideas that need to be prioritised so that AI's benefits can be equitably felt throughout society.

If the topics of AI language diversity, technology access, basic infrastructure development, and proper application to agriculture and environmental causes are not addressed, he said, the technology gap might widen for lower-income economies.

Despite the development of multilingual AI language models in recent years, their learning abilities are still skewed to perform better in English, a 2025 study from the MBZUAI found. In 2025, the UAE’s government-backed Technology Innovation Institute announced a “leap forward” for AI with the introduction of Falcon Arabic, a model that it described as being “fluent in Arabic”.

Mr Suzman says philanthropic partnerships such as those between the Gates Foundation and Microsoft, Google and others, can help to ensure that languages are not left behind. He concluded that in developing countries, time should not be wasted on debates between open-source or closed models, as what truly matters are the outcomes and access to AI tools.